Guidelines for free indexing applicants

Publishing can be a big, expensive business, or it can be done on a small scale by research communities themselves – by researchers for researchers.

ScienceOpen offers free indexing for up to 10 journals per month and the best candidate receives a free journal collection page for 1 year. At DOAJ we are joining this initiative by recommending a maximum of 10 journals per month to ScienceOpen so they can be freely indexed in their database.

 

 

 

In order to qualify for their free indexing offer your journal must meet the following requirements, all of which contribute to enhancing the visibility and discoverability of your content.

• Be indexed in DOAJ and without publication charges

The Directory of Open Access Journals lists over 9000 open access scholarly journals meeting certain quality standards. Listing in DOAJ is a requirement for the ScienceOpen free indexing program to assure good quality articles from an editorial standpoint. Furthermore, having a DOAJ IDs also ease the indexing procedure significantly. With your articles registered in DOAJ, the only thing you have to do is to check there are no APCs or other publication charges and to send ScienceOpen a list of the DOAJ ID-s for each article record and your content will be indexed in no time. 

• Go for more and add your DOIs too

Registering your DOIs in CrossRef is an easy way to put your articles on the map of scientific communication in the digital world. Assigning DOIs to your articles and integrating them to the common system of scholarly reference linking makes your content:

• Trackable and easily identifiable
• Easy to find, cite, and link
• Easy to assess and follow up measures of re-use
• Interconnected with other records of scholarly communication

All these features enhance discoverability of and drive more traffic to your articles, and these are key issues in the current state of academic publishing. If you would like to learn more about becoming a member of Crossref, we would be happy to point you in the right direction. Your content is too valuable to publish it into a vacuum.

The trackability of DOIs also allows ScienceOpen to monitor Altmetric scores of your articles both in collection and article levels.

Based on all this, our suggestion for DOAJ members with DOIs registered to CrossRef is to submit a DOI list to enjoy the benefits of cross referencing. For publishes with medical profile: working with your PMC and PubMed IDs have the same benefits and are also a hassle-free ways of indexing.

 

• Go pro: maximize your context and readership by adding references

Having conventionalized and persistent identifiers like DOIs or DOAJ IDs are without doubt big steps forward in enhancing visibility and trackability of your content. However, it’s references which have the real potential to integrate and link your articles into ScienceOpen corpus of more than 28 million article records. For each reference, ScienceOpen creates a new article record that refers back to the seed article, so they are all driving traffic to your article in question. These are like paths leading the reader to the article and interconnect it with other nodes of the research network. In the end, it’s the web of references that creates a structured network from ScienceOpen’s dynamically expanding corpus. Embedding your articles into ScienceOpen’s citation and recommendation network through references adds a new dimension to research context and thus grants your content the privilege of better visibility and higher citation frequency.

And how does it work in practice? By using JATS Archive 1.0 and JATS Publishing 3.0 article XML files as data sources.This format has the serious advantage of containing easily extractable citation information, on the basis of which they pull out references, and interconnect them with the relevant nodes in our research network.

In sum, we either prefer to work with your DOIs, DOAJ/PubMed/PMC ID-s or with JATS Archive 1.0 article XMLs. The infographics below summarize and help you to find the best solution for indexing your articles.

This is a guest post by Andrea Marchitelli, Paola Galimberti and Andrea Bollini, who write about their experience of being DOAJ editors and their published paper: “Helping journals to improve their publishing standards: a data analysis of DOAJ new criteria effects”

After DOAJ implemented new criteria for inclusion of open access journals and invited all journals listed in the directory to reapply, a large number of journals was removed from the database, most for failing to submit an updated application within the deadline. DOAJ volunteers, Paola Galimberti as an  Editor and Andrea Marchitelli as an Associate Editor for Italy, wanted to investigate if their contribution, and the contribution by DOAJ volunteers all over the world, was effective in trying to improve the quality of journals indexed in the directory.

When the idea to write an article about the first results of the reapplication process became more clear, Paola and Andrea decided to involve Andrea Bollini, Chief Technology Innovation Officer at 4SCIENCE and Dominic Mitchell, DOAJ Community Manager, in the analysis of data.

Being active participants in the DOAJ community was really helpful when designing the article structure, because it made it possible to know, from an internal point of view, the steps of the reapplication process and all the checks needed to verify reapplications, where to look for the necessary data, and so on.

The starting point for this investigation was the scepticism about open access journals caused by Beall’s lists, by some retraction and misconduct cases that involved open access journals, and by some articles that suggested open access to be a way of publishing low quality journals under the pressure of the publish or perish system.

The main interest as editor and associate editor for a volunteer group deeply involved in this process was to examine the results of the implementation of the new criteria, and their capability to improve the quality of the directory and the reliability of the indexed information.

A dataset of 12,595 journals included in DOAJ since its very beginning in 2003 until May 15th 2016, was examined and compared to other sources. This operation had an immediate effect. The number of journals deleted from DOAJ during this period was 3,776; the majority of them (2,851 journals) were excluded because publishers failed to complete the reapplication on time; 490 had ceased publication or were otherwise inactive; 375 were excluded for ethical issues; 53 because they were no longer open access or the content was embargoed, the final 7 were removed for other reasons. The top five countries in terms of the percentage of journals removed were: Japan (74% of journals removed); Pakistan (60%); Canada (51%); United States (50%); and Mexico (49%).

Our study has shown that 158 of the removed journals were included in Beall’s lists; 1130 journals indexed in DOAJ were included in Scopus and/or JCR. Our analysis demonstrates that, thanks to the new acceptance criteria, and to the improved screening process performed by volunteer groups under the direction of the new criteria, there was a noticeable quality improvement of the journals indexed in DOAJ.

As members involved in this quality improvement process, the authors would consider the work made by DOAJ staff and volunteers in the different groups as a very effective result.

Full-text article: Marchitelli, Andrea, Paola Galimberti, Andrea Bollini, & Dominic Mitchell. “Improvement of editorial quality of journals indexed in DOAJ: a data analysis” JLIS.it [Online], 8.1 (2017): 1-21. Web. 8 Feb. 2017. DOI: https://www.jlis.it/article/view/12052